Alzabo

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The maintainer of this distribution is looking for someone to take over! If you're interested then please contact them via email.

Changes for version 0.30

The convert.pl script in eg/ has been updated to handle the new release. IMPORTANT: I forgot to include a mention of this in the last release but you need to run the script _before_ installing a new version of Alzabo.
Many improvements and updates to Alzabo::MethodMaker. Highlights include fixing a bug that prevented the insert and update methods from being created, a new callback system that allows you to specify all the method names to be generated, and a new 'self_relations' option for tables that have parent/child relationships with themself.
Fix handling of NULL columns for inserts and updates. Now, Alzabo only throws an exception if the column is not nullable and has no default. If it has a default and is specified as NULL then it will not be included in the INSERT clause (in which case the RDBMS should insert the default value itself).
Fix bugs in Postgres reverse engineering. Defaults were not handled properly, nor were numeric column type length and precision.
The schema creator and data browser now allow you to enter the host for database connections where needed.
Foreign keys can now span multiple columns. This means you can have a relation from foo.foo_id and foo.index_id to bar.foo_id and bar.index_id. This required some changes to the interface for the foreign key objects. Notably, the Alzabo::ForeignKey->column_from and Alzabo::ForeignKey->column_to methods are now Alzabo::ForeignKey->columns_from and Alzabo::ForeignKey->columns_to. In addition, the parameters given to the Alazbo::Create::Schema->add_relation have changed.
Major changes to caching architecture. The caching code has been split up. There is now a 'storing' class, which holds onto the objects (the cache). Then there is a 'sync' class. This class handles expiration and deletion tracking. These two classes can be mixed and matched. Right now there is only one storage class (which stores the objects in memory). There are 3 syncing classes. One, NullSync, doesn't actually sync objects. It does track deletions, but not expirations. The others, IPCSync and DBMSync, use IPC or DBM files to track expiration and deletion of objects.
Doing this work highlighted some bugs in the caching/syncing code. One oversight was that if you deleted an object and then inserted another row with the exact same primary key, the cache continued to think the object was deleted. Other bugs also surfaced. These have been fixed and the test suite has been updated so caching should be stable (if not, I'll have to cry).
When viewing an existing column in the schema creator, defaults, lengths, and precision of 0 were not being shown.
Alzabo::Runtime::Table->row_count can now take a where clause.
Fix bugs in Alzabo::Create::Table. This was causing problems with indexes when the table name was changed.
Fixed a bug in Alzabo::Util that caused the test cases to fail if Alzabo hadn't been previously installed. Reported by Robert Goff.
The SQLMaker class is now smarter about not letting you make bad SQL. For example, if you try to make a WHERE clause with tables not mentioned in the FROM clause, it will throw an exception. This will hopefully help catch logic errors in your code a bit sooner.
Removed use of prepare_cached in Alzabo::Driver. This has the potential to cause some strange errors under Alzabo. Because of the way Alzabo works, it is possible to have a Cursor object holding onto a statement handle that needs to be used elsewhere (by a row object, for example). It is safer to let a new statement handle be created in this case.
INCOMPATIBILITIES
See the note above about the changes required to support multi-column foreign keys.
Because of the aforementioned changes to the caching architecture, caching just does not work the way it used.